Naïve Backpacker, Meet Patronising Superhero
Part One of GIMME SOME TRUTH, WONDER WOMAN - The United States of 2021 in Multipart Disharmony
On 16 October 1968 eight-year-old David was sitting with his father on the stairs of their London home. He was confused and a bit frightened.
A few months earlier Robert Francis 'Bobby' Kennedy had been assassinated. David had been aware of that – he had absorbed the shock and the sadness of it. Now something else was going on that he needed to understand.
We’d been watching the Olympics on TV. The commentary had gone wild. There was outrage over the airwaves. So I asked my father what the fuss was all about.
Two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, had given the Black Power salute from the winners’ podium while the US national anthem was played.
Dad wanted to help me understand. I think he might have seen it as a defining moment of his parenting. He calmly told me about ‘racial discrimination’ in the USA and also in South Africa.
That was the term he used. That was the moment it entered my lexicon – of language and knowledge. He explained that it was the same thing as Jews had experienced. He and I knew that was a way for me to understand it.
As a Jew I sensed from that moment where my solidarity belonged. My liberal, progressive politics were forged.
Almost eleven years later in 1979 I spent three months travelling around North America by train, bus and hitchhiking. It was a coming-of-age adventure before I headed back to England to start university.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to recount the whole trip here, just a few of its early moments that strike me as relevant to what’s going on now in the ‘land of the free’.
I arrived in New York, where I stayed about 10 days, and had a formative experience marching down Fifth Avenue on Sunday 24 June.
Being a decade since an infamous police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the 1979 gay pride march was referred to on that day as ‘Stonewall 10’.
I was proud to be there alongside Lou Rispoli, the gay friend I was staying with, also in Greenwich Village. He became a mentor for me.
I treasure the photos I have of Lou and his friends on 24 June 1979, all of us celebrating their identity. And I remember my outrage when a heckler yelled at them from the sidewalk that they were ‘Un-American’.
Many of Lou’s friends, including ones I marched with, died in the AIDS plague of the 1980s and 90s.
Lou was murdered in 2012 after a lifetime of gay rights advocacy. There is now a portion of a street in Woodside, Queens named after him: Lou Rispoli Way.
He had spent a lot of his time caring for friends with AIDS. Like my great-great-great grandfather Simon Jacobs, who died in 1864, Lou was a ‘watcher to the sick’.
That’s the entry under ‘rank or profession’ on Simon Jacobs’s death certificate. He had been a ‘general dealer’ and a greengrocer according to the London census records of 1841, ‘51 and ‘61 but it seems his final years were ones of care and bearing witness.
Well, that’s how I like to glorify my early 19th century ancestor. While I lovingly remember Lou I actually have no idea what Simon Jacobs was like.
Were the sick people he ‘watched’ victims of a plague? The timing doesn't look quite right for cholera in London but it could have been typhus or yellow fever.
Roll forward and back to 1979. From New York I travelled south to Philadelphia, Washington and Charlotte where my aunt and cousins lived, and from there to the Sunshine State of Florida and on to New Orleans.
As I looked out of the Greyhound bus window I saw stuff that shocked me.
I had left the high-rise wealth of Manhattan and I was now passing by shanty houses. Southern African-Americans, the descendants of enslaved people, were still living in the most basic conditions. Comparable maybe to the East End conditions of widower Simon Jacobs and his five children in 1830s London.
Call me naïve – it’s a fair call - but this was 1979, ten years after the USA had put men on the moon. I hadn’t expected to see living conditions like that. To my 19-year-old progressive sensibilities there was something deeply wrong here.
That three-month adventure opened my eyes to the contradictions of America. Lou hadn’t warned me – or if he had I hadn’t taken it in – about the different country I would encounter outside New York.
There is one more startling moment I want to mention. I was sitting on a hillside somewhere in North Carolina, enjoying an outdoor concert with my cousin. I can’t remember the bands who played that day. What I do remember is my surprise at seeing the Confederate flag flying among my fellow concert-goers.
It felt like I had travelled from enlightened gay-rights activism to mindless racial bigotry. I knew that if that flag means anything it means waging civil war in the cause of slavery and white supremacy.
Watching the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021 I heard outrage from media commentators seeing the Confederate flag carried by members of the violent mob.
Before that day the flag hadn’t been waved publicly within six miles of the Capitol – and it had only got that close in a Civil War battle in 1864, three months after my ancestor Simon Jacobs died.
As for me, I shrugged my shoulders when I saw the Confederate flag on that awful January day this year. My eyes had been opened over 40 years before to the extent of some Americans’ love for it.
The way I make sense of it now is that the flag communicates defiant resentment at having lost the US Civil War – historic feelings that are embedded in the rural culture of the South.
That defiant resentment is maintained nowadays by redneck southerners in the face of urban and suburban Americans moving South with their liberal, progressive inclinations.
At elections those Liberals have been turning states like Georgia and Arizona from red Republican to blue Democratic. They have even been tearing down sacred Confederate statues. The historic southern resistance culture is under siege.
There are nicer sides to southern culture. Like the warm, patient friendliness of strangers.
In recent years my brother John and I have been researching our ancestry. We’ve discovered our Jamaican relatives, including our newfound cousin Lulanne Jacobs who currently lives in Louisiana.
Lulanne reminded me of that patient friendliness of the South and how it can contrast with impatience in the North. And on my many visits to my beloved New York I have certainly experienced aggression from strangers. I acknowledge too that I’ve responded in kind.
That word ‘aggression’, when associated with the North, plays into the idea that the Civil War is more appropriately called the ‘War of Northern Aggression’. It’s a name that arose in the 1950s when southern segregationists wanted to equate efforts to end segregation with efforts to abolish slavery about 100 years earlier.
Those ideas – southern warmth, northern aggression etc – are all tropes. But a downtrodden Southern resentment is something you can see and feel and taste from about 150 years ago in The News of the World, a film that has recently made it to our cinema screens.
OK, I say that with sympathy for people who have been denied by the Covid plague from seeing anything in their cinemas.
For us in Aotearoa, aka New Zealand, for months (apart from some short spells recently) it’s just our borders that have been locked down. We’ve been able to enjoy newly released films on the big screen, sitting in the dark with ice creams and popcorn.
When we’ve talked to family and friends around the world it’s been hard not to come across as smug. So does that make me a ‘smug Liberal’? I guess so.
The Progressive in me hopes that 6 January 2021 was the Confederate flag’s last big hurrah.
But on that day I was personally more upset – and I find that I still am - by the image of ‘6MWE’ t-shirts, standing for ‘Six Million Weren’t Enough’ and referring to the number of Jews who perished at the hands of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.
Horrible, horrible, horrible!
I am repulsed when I see swastikas on clothing or graffitied on buildings or graves. It’s visceral. That symbol wants my Jewish blood.
How do American Liberals feel when they see the Confederate flag? What I picked up live from media commentators as they watched Trump’s mob in action on 6 January was shock over where and how the flag was being flown.
Shortly after the storming of the Capitol I was myself shocked to read about a poll which showed that 21% of all voters and 45% of Republican voters approved of what had happened on 6 January.
As the days went by those numbers thankfully dropped to more like 8% of all voters and 15% of Republicans supporting the storming of the Capitol. Political winds were pivoting.
Is our shock a problem for Trumpian Americans? I think not. I think they love to provoke us Progressive types. But the thing they really hate and despise us for is our disdain. And that takes me to another film that was released at the same time as The News of the World.
The timing of Wonder Woman 1984 was actually thanks to the Covid plague, which had pushed it later than its original release date of June 2020. For me it’s apt timing as the USA moves into a post-Trump era and recovers from a presidential plague of lies.
Fact checkers are reporting that, with a new incumbent in the White House, they have been freed up to focus on other lies than presidential ones.
Daniel Dale, CNN’s in-house fact checker says he’s reading the new president’s every word intensively but “because he talks less, because he lies less there is simply time to do other people in addition to him.”
Sadly however, the lies of Donald John Trump are still very much around and still highly contagious.
His successor in the White House calls him “the former guy”. I like that. I bet he hates it.
He reminded me of Voldemort parading himself to his Death Eaters when he announced to his followers on leaving Washington that “we” will “be back in some form.”
But that’s another parallel world altogether so let’s stick for now with the world of Wonder Woman.
I enjoyed watching Wonder Woman 1984 on the big screen with my two daughters. But I didn’t feel as positive about it as I felt about the first Wonder Woman film, released in 2017. My daughters seemed to feel the same way.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the problem was… and then in the middle of the night my dissatisfaction crystallised.
The first film, while thoroughly and enjoyably fantastical, was rooted in a big political fact. It was based at the time of the armistice negotiations at the end of World War One. It featured an imagined plot to ignore and disrupt the armistice. It worked really well as a story on that what-if basis.
But Wonder Woman 1984, while also thoroughly and enjoyably fantastical, was not based on any such alternate history.
It was set recognisably in the USA of 1984, five years after I had been there, but it wasn’t based on anything that actually happened in 1984 – or might not have happened without the divine intervention of Wonder Woman Diana Prince.
For a film like that to work well as a story it needed to feel somehow truth-based, and it didn’t.
Even the President of the USA was nothing like the guy who inhabited the White House at the time, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
After the great portrayals of Presidents Trump and Obama by Brendan Gleeson and Kingsley Ben-Adir in The Comey Rule I’ve come to expect more from screen occupants of the Oval Office.
Truth is a lodestar in the Wonder Woman films. For Diana Prince and her Amazon island people “truth is all there is” and “nothing good is born from lies.”
So I guess they’re not Trump’s favourite films.
He is nicely mirrored when the Trumpesque get-rich-quick confidence trickster Max Lord insists “I am not a con man, I’m a television personality and a respected businessman.”
But without a true big political fact as its basis, enabling a historical conjecture, then, at least for this viewer, Wonder Woman 1984 falls short of the mark set by its predecessor.
Yet there is still a lot of political value in the film – and not just the mirroring of Trump’s personality in Max Lord. I’ll come to some of the more thematic stuff in the film but first I need to catch up with the Wonder Woman disdain point I left dangling about 500 words ago.
I’ll do that next week. You’ll see why I’ve called Wonder Woman patronising – unfairly of course.
Part Two Next Week: HELLO ANTIHEROES - Starring Trumpians and over-produced elites
Hi Tim, good to hear from you! I agree with you about that point and there's stuff I have written about that, which I'll include in a future post. And I think both factors are at play - combating racist voter suppression and southern migration of Liberals.
By the way people, if you are ever in or near Lumsden in the South Island of Aotearoa, go visit Tim at the Lumsden Hotel. I haven't yet made it down there myself but I hope to someday soon.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/418866/why-lumsden-is-hot-right-now-a-local-s-love-for-his-town
I don't think Liberals moving South are the reason the South is changing from solid red. I think it is black people who have always been there demanding the right to vote and doing it.